Page 6 of Cruel Summer

A lot of people they’d gone to school with had left the area.

Jacksonville was a small, quaint town, with the larger “city” of Medford the place with most of the big-box stores, medical facilities and schools.

There were limited opportunities, and many people went elsewhere—Portland, Eugene, or down south to California—for work and opportunities.

A lot of people had come back in the years since, but right in that space in their early twenties, there weren’t a lot of people around that they’d known in school, with most of Will’s friends having moved away.

She hadn’t understood the connection between him and Will. Except Will just seemed to still find him extremely cool, and was excited that the school’s rebel-with-no-particular-cause had thought he was cool enough to hang out with.

They’d have barbecues at the house, and Logan would just man the grill, not especially friendly. But Becca was sweet, and when she’d had Chloe, she and Sam had spent time sitting together, both with little babies and sleep deprivation.

Then Becca had gotten sick.

Sam could only admire the way Logan had been with her during her illness. The care that he’d shown her, the tenderness. She’d seen it then. What Becca saw in him.

Chloe had spent a lot of time at their house when Becca was sick, and a lot of time after. Sam had been happy to be a cool-aunt figure to her, especially since she and Will only had the boys.

That was how they’d ended up combining family vacations and game nights and holidays.

They were friends. Except it always felt like they weren’t. She felt like she always said and did the wrong thing with Logan, like every interaction was akin to tossing a knife in the air, hoping she caught it by the handle instead of the blade.

Finding her footing with this man felt precarious at best.

And this was the worst timing ever.

A Logan Martin special.

Was he here to talk to Will? Had Will told him ?

She’d told her friends, so…so it stood to reason.

She found herself walking quickly to the front door and pulling it open, feeling immediately engulfed by discomfort. He was too tall. She had to look up too far to see his face. It was weird and she didn’t like it.

“What are you doing here?”

“Picking up the power washer your husband borrowed from me?”

She huffed. “Was I supposed to know about that?”

“He said it was in the garage. I just wanted to let you know before I went digging in your garage so I didn’t scare you.”

That was downright reasonable. Nearly kind.

“Oh. Well. Feel free.”

“Thanks. Are you…”

Her irritation unraveled. “No. I’m not okay, thank you. Did you talk to Will?”

“About the power washer,” he said, his tone maddeningly calm.

“Is that all?”

“We may have discussed a sports team or two. Ethan’s summer plans and Chloe’s move to Santa Clara. Is that…a problem?”

She tried to read his face, to see if he was holding something back or not. But she couldn’t tell.

“No,” she said.

She decided to take him at face value because she wasn’t going to tell him what was happening. Even if he did know, she wasn’t going to have the conversation with him. It was hard enough to look her two best friends in the eye and explain it.

The idea that this man might know more about the state of her marriage than she did made her want to break things.

“I’m going to grab the power washer,” he said.

“Okay.”

She looked at him, long and hard and until it was difficult to breathe, and he didn’t say anything.

“Is there something you need, Sam?” His voice was rough, and it made her uncomfortable in the way only Logan ever did.

“No.”

“Okay then.” He turned and walked toward the garage. She closed the door, rubbing her chest, trying to ease the tightness there, except she knew it wasn’t physical.

She watched Logan from her secret position by the kitchen window.

Watched him open the garage—which he knew the code for—and take out the power washer, loading it into the back of his truck.

A truck she hadn’t seen before, but it wasn’t unusual for Logan to be in a different vehicle every third time she saw him.

Logan was unpredictable like that.

She didn’t like that. She preferred things uninteresting. She preferred it when things just bumped along. Expected. Predictable. Organized.

That was when Will got home. He pulled in next to Logan’s truck and stopped and talked to Logan before coming in, which just about sent her.

She was waiting to talk to him. She was his wife, the one he’d just dropped a bomb on, and he was ignoring the smoldering wreckage that was her, so that he could have a chat with Logan.

She watched their faces. Tried to discern if they were actually talking about anything serious or if it was just the sort of thing Logan had said they’d talked about recently.

Kids and sports.

Finally, they said goodbye, and Logan got into his truck. Then Will pulled the rest of the way into the garage, and Sam took that as her cue to find somewhere to wait for him where it wouldn’t look like she’d been peering out the kitchen window the whole time.

She went with sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, because that was at least normal for her, and it only took thirty seconds to make one of those single-brew cups.

By the time Will came in, she was sitting, looking contemplative and yet also beautiful, she hoped.

“Hi,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”

He sounded uncomfortable. Nervous. This man who had been married to her for more than half of their lives. She had to hand it to him. He’d certainly managed to inject uncertainty into things. Maybe he found uncertainty exciting.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, sitting down in the chair at the opposite end of the table from her.

“I want… I want you to explain it to me,” she said. “All of it. Like what exactly this means to you and why you want it and…when. When you started wanting it.”

“Okay. Where do you want me to start?”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Is this like key parties and upside-down pineapples and stuff? Like do you want to do this with me?”

He shook his head. “No, that’s not… No.”

“Yeah, Whitney said swinging was different, but I had to make sure that was true in whatever online forums you’re reading.”

“You told Whitney?”

“I told Whitney and Elysia. First thing this morning.”

He made a weird, indignant sound. “I haven’t told anyone.”

No wonder Logan had been looking at her like she was on bath salts.

She felt extremely relieved to hear that.

But also defensive. “You’ve had all the time in the world to think about this.

You got to choose the moment. I was blindsided.

I needed to talk to my friends about it, and I’m not going to apologize for that. ”

He nodded slowly. “That’s fair.”

“Gee, thanks, Will. Glad you find me fair.” She growled and lowered her head. “Sorry. I’m going to try… I’m going to try to be fair, okay? And not snarky. Angry is fine, but I’m going to try to not…do that.”

He let out a long, slow breath, and she resented him taking the oxygen. “This feeling didn’t hit me overnight. I guess… I hoped you were unhappy too.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “You hoped I was unhappy?”

“Yes. We’re always so in sync. I started feeling…

I guess unsatisfied a few years ago. Started wondering what else was out there, and I hoped you were feeling that too.

That you would say, ‘ Great , Will, I have some things I need too.’ I just thought maybe I was the first one who was willing to admit that I wasn’t happy with things as they were. ”

“Well, no. Sorry. I was happy. I was happy with everything. We did the hard stuff, and now we’re supposed to just get to enjoy it.”

She realized, as soon as she said it, that it couldn’t be true if he didn’t like their life. It couldn’t be true if he wasn’t happy.

“I love you,” he said. He’d said it a lot since last night. “Through all of this, all my questioning, I’ve known that much. It’s about me, it really is. But I understand that because we’re married, that makes it about you too. But it isn’t because of you. It isn’t anything you did or didn’t do.”

Sam didn’t know if that was better or worse. To know she couldn’t stop it, fix it, learn how to be bolder, kinkier, whatever he might want. To know that this was something happening in him she couldn’t change or fix.

Maybe it was good to know it wasn’t her fault, but that meant she couldn’t do anything. She hated that. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with that.

“We got married so young, and I wanted to do right by you. By the boys. I became a middle-aged man at eighteen. We never got to do the things other people our age did. We didn’t go party, we didn’t drink, we didn’t do casual hookups.

I guess this is what a midlife crisis is.

I guess this is what it looks like. When you realize this is your life.

For me, for us, this is the only life we’ve gotten to live.

Our youngest son is going to Europe all summer, and we never did anything like that.

You know other people were spending their summers traveling and having flings.

We dated all through high school. We were married before we graduated.

We didn’t have even a couple of years to find ourselves, to figure out who we were, to make mistakes… ”

“Many people would argue,” she said, her throat feeling scratchy, “that we did in fact make a mistake. The one that ensured we had to get married.”

“That’s a good point. We made one choice very young that put us on a path, and now…

we don’t have to be on that path anymore.

Or we can widen it.” He let out a ragged breath.

“I don’t want to blow our lives up. That’s what led me to kind of researching all of this.

I want an open relationship because it means freedom and honesty.

Because to an extent it keeps our relationships ours, but lets us have other things too. ”